On the Significance of Religion for Global Diplomacy

Philip McDonagh, Kishan Manocha, John Neary, Lucia Vázquez Mendoza

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000264159
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion, Politik & Staat

What could it mean, in terms of strengthening multilateral diplomacy, if the UN, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the European Union, and other regional diplomatic frameworks engaged more creatively with a religious perspective?

In this ground-breaking volume it is argued that international organisations, backed by governments, can and should use their convening power to initiate new, multi-layered frameworks of engagement, inclusive of the representatives of religion. This can make multilateralism more fit for purpose and have a major impact over time on our planetary future.

The book is divided into an introduction and six chapters:

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• Towards a culture of encounter inclusive of the world's religious traditions

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• Structural questions in 21st-century diplomacy

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• Knowing what we ought to know: the issues that face 21st-century diplomacy

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• Towards the global objective of a common peace for humanity

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• Understanding how change happens

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• The diplomacy of the two standards

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• The development of new frameworks of engagement

A brief outline is offered of what an all-European initiative – an a gora for Europe – might look like if, in the 2020s, there were the political will to inaugurate a European regional process reflecting the orientation and methodology proposed in the book.

Combining cutting-edge research and reflection, with concrete recommendations for academics, religious actors, policy makers, and practitioners, this concise and accessible volume helps to build bridges between these oftentimes separated spheres of engagement.

The Open Access version of this book, available at https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003053842, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

1

Structural questions in 21st-century diplomacy

Public truth in a pluralist global society

Gandhi promoted the production of khadi, hand-spun cotton yarn, as the symbol and spearhead of an inclusive, non-violent social and economic order based on useful work. Swaraj of the least powerful – the self-determination of the poor – became the touchstone, or talisman, of political progress: ‘to a people famishing and idle, the only acceptable form in which God can dare appear is work and the promise of food as wages’ (Gandhi, 2006, p. 257).

Gandhi’s option for the poor, though often criticised for a lack of policy detail, is reflected in the SDGs in the formulations: ‘no one should be left behind’ and ‘reaching the last first’. ‘The poorest and those most in need’ are central to the Document on Human Fraternity signed by Pope Francis and Grand Imam Ahmed el-Tayeb (HCHF, 2019).

The axioms that we propose in this book function like Gandhi’s talisman as a common criterion of evaluation in a variety of circumstances. Our aim is to promote a diplomatic practice in which guiding values, understood in a new way, as ‘transcripts from life’ (Radhakrishnan, 1980 [1927], p. 14), interact effectively with specialised competencies across all the relevant subject areas of multilateral diplomacy.

In anthropological or civilisational terms, our most urgent task is to affirm the possibility of an effective public truth. In a pluralist global society, we need to embrace the commonality underlying our differences (important and inevitable as these differences are); to frame our differences in such a way that we continue to understand one another; and to see ourselves at some level as companions on a shared journey.

Against this background, our thesis is that well-designed ‘frameworks of engagement’ can narrow ‘the gap between global problems and our capacity to meet them’ (Haass, 2020, p. 3). By creating such frameworks, we would signal our openness to new designs for living.

The expectancy that inspires this book is that if the engagement of public authorities with religious traditions becomes our compass, the global political journey will veer in the coming decades towards the ‘true north’ of solidarity, sharing, stewardship of the planet, and swaraj for the most vulnerable – and will do this palpably, in ways that people will find compelling in terms of their lived experience.

Finding a common language

Religions, on entering the public square, become part of a wider dialogue or conversation. They need to make themselves understood in the common language of reason. A contemporary authority on the Chinese tradition asks whether Confucianism can contribute over the coming decades to a ‘more mature’ way of thinking about international political issues. For this to happen, he argues, Chinese thinkers will need to ‘justify Confucian values in terms that do not require prior acceptance of Confucianism’ (Chan, 2014, p. 23). This is exactly the spirit of the dialogue we recommend in this book. None of us can expect everyone else to embrace our own worldview as the price of entering the conversation.

How then, in an inherently pluralist world, can the conversation about the future begin?

In Athens in the 5th century BCE, an ‘inherited conglomerate’ of ideas (Dodds, 1951), including a mythological account of the gods, was no longer persuasive, at least for many people. In philosophy, history, ethnography, medical research, and the theatre, as well as in political practice, new ideas were tested. Socrates is the emblematic figure in this transition (Canto-Sperber, 2000; Sassi, 2018). Earlier philosophers are classified as the ‘pre-Socratics’; later schools of philosophy refer back to Socrates.

Socrates and his contemporaries approach the question of values in politics in a disinterested spirit of enquiry, returning to basic ‘structural’ questions in a manner that sets an example for today’s global situation in which no single vision of the truth prevails. The basic ‘Socratic question’ – how should we live?, or what is our design for living? – comes first. The structural questions listed below emanate from this initial question.

If every action aims at some good, is there a higher good, such as happiness, which is valued for its own sake and becomes the ‘unifying focus of all our scattered enterprises’?

(Veale, 2006, p. 238)

Which avenues of enquiry are relevant to politics? Are there forms of knowledge, such as (in ancient Greece) medical expertise or ship-building, that are valid in themselves, irrespective of anyone’s overall worldview? In our search for a ‘unifying focus’, is there a role for ‘wisdom’ or the ‘wise person’ – poet, prophet, or philosopher – who relies on something mo...